Candidacy : Jody Goldberg

[Jody Goldberg <jgoldberg home com>]

name  : Jody Goldberg
email : jgoldberg home com
affiliation : Ximian

I have been a free software advocate since the early 90s when Cygnus'
developers demonstrated that 'Support' would actually solve problems.  Since
then I've contributed to several projects, from G++ and Wine, to Nethack and a
pager for CDE.  As the current maintainer of Gnumeric I'm on the front lines of
what users like and dislike in GNOME.  Our technologies are good.  Our
integration could use some work.  I'd like to work towards improving
communication between the far flung elements of GNOME to improve that.

Detailed Positions

    - Communication
    GUADEC has been invaluable in dousing flames, soothing irritation, and
    promoting 'gnome-love'.  Yet, as an annual meeting it is too infrequent to
    deal with the myriad issues that arise during the year.  Things are
    periodicly ignored, or duplicated  because there is no forum to get all the
    relevant people together.  The board is _not_ the group to make decisions,
    but it would be a good place to initiate the discussion and drag the
    relevant folk to the table.

    - Software Life-cycle
    GNOME 2.0 has taken a long time.  Having layers of libraries in our
    platform introduces latencies in the development time, and by forcing new
    features to first appear in the core of the stable platform we loose the
    ability to pipeline our development and reduce the latency.  I'd like to
    see some guidelines that would have extensions first appear in an unstable
    library like a GAL/EEL and propagate downwards as they are tested and
    polished.  A release would then ask 'what features are ready to move into
    the core' rather than having the new code propagate upwards as successive
    layers of libraries are ported to the new code.  This would increase the
    visibility of new development.

    - Integration
    Taken individually GNOME applications are fairly universally accepted as
    being top notch.  Unfortunately, that is the only way they can be taken now.
    The amount of integration and the level of consistency between the
    applications has suffered.  This has definitely affected awareness, and
    usability.  Look at the press, and notice that things with 'Office' in the
    title are mentioned more frequently than individual apps.  Why would users
    want to configure the same information in multiple applications ?  With
    GNOME-2.0 and the stabilisation of Bonobo we can address these issues.
    A 'GNOME App Cabal' should discuss elements that can be shared.  Shortly
    after the port to 2.0 I'd like to see a coordinated applications release.

    - Fonts
    This is a multi faceted problem that is critical to the success of GNOME as
    a desktop.  The board can deal with some elements and can instigate
    discussion for other elements.  As an example, there is work in progress to
    obtain good quality fonts for GNOME specificly and X in general.  That should
    definitely continue.  I would like to see some coordinated discussion on
    font configuration.

Qualifications

    - Gnumeric Maintainer
    - Long time GNOME contributor (gnome-print, gnome-libs, bonobo, gtk, eog)
    - A member of 'gnome-old-folks' (where gnome-old-folks >= 30)
    - I have a 3 month old baby, so I'm used to dealing with excrement